Contrary
to the newspaper's self-professed belief in ''plain language'', the article in
question, from the headline to the body, is a master-piece of embellishment or
dressed-up language. It is loaded with innuendos and decidedly pejorative at
best, and downright racist at worst.

The
Economist wrote that President Buhari wants to ''tame''
Nigerians with the ''Change Begins With
Me'' Campaign. For those who are the owners of the English language, the
use of that word is unpardonable, the verb ''tame''
suggests that Nigerians are some kind of wild animals that must be
domesticated, and the usage reveals the mind-set of the authors of the article:
a deliberate put down of a whole people under the guise of criticising a
government policy.

The
paper, in striving to reach a preconceived conclusion, also insinuated that
some 150,000 volunteers are being trained as enforcers of the ''Change
Begins With Me'' Campaign. This is not true. In his speech at the
launch of the Campaign on September 8th 2016, the President, a
globally-acknowledged leader who believes strongly in the rule of law, left no
one in doubt that moral suasion, the very antithesis of force, will be employed
to achieve attitudinal change among Nigerians. In that speech, the President
said: ''I am therefore appealing to all
Nigerians to be part of this campaign.'' To the best of our knowledge and,
surely the knowledge of those who own the language, the words ''appeal'' and
''enforce'' are not synonymous.

In its
rush to discredit the ''Change Begins With Me'' Campaign, The
Economist, a widely respected newspaper, fell below its own standards
by choosing to be economical with the truth. Enforcement is not part of the
strategies to be employed under the Campaign, and nowhere has it been said that
the ''moral police'' will be unleashed, as reported by the newspaper. In
writing the story, the paper did not even deem it necessary to speak with any
official of the government, thus breaching one of the codes of journalism,
which is fairness. It chose instead to quote a ''critic'' of Mr. President in a
perfunctory manner.

Again, The
Economist made the same mistakes that most critics of the ''Change
Begins With Me'' Campaign have made: Rushing to comment on a campaign
they do not understand. The Campaign had barely been launched when the critics brought
out their big guns to shoot it down. In the process, many of them ended up
shooting themselves in the foot. Had they tarried a while to allow the
government to roll out the details of the campaign, they might have shown more
circumspection than they did in their criticism.

It was only those who
lacked prescience in the heady days of the campaigns for the 2015 elections
that failed to realise that the All Progressives Congress (APC) was a
contraption waiting to unravel. All that was needed was the appropriate time
for the party to suffer an implosion and disrupt its self-valourisation for
being different from the much-pilloried People’s Democratic Party (PDP). And
now in less than two years after assuming power, the party is in the grip of
crises from which recovery may not be possible.

This should have been
expected in so far as the APC grew out of a myriad of crises of other parties.
These crises have continued to haunt the APC in a way that has rendered its
performance since its emergence less than stellar. Of course, no one makes the
case that the existence of conflicting interests is aberrant in a democracy
with its attendant plurality of perspectives. One moment of such a contest of
interests that culminated in discontent was the quest for the chairmanship of
the party that led to the exit of Tom Ikimi and his supporters.

But the troubling
reality is that these crises have worsened since the APC assumed the reins of
power. They have negated all expectations that after the electoral victory,
previous differences would be relegated for a common front to tackle national
problems. Thus, the only area where the APC could be said to have done well
aside from winning the 2015 elections remains in its playing the role of an
opposition party. It succeeded in demonising the then government of the PDP and
eventually made it unacceptable at the polls.

What has
dogged the APC and prevented it from building on its electoral success is a
lack of a clear ideological vision that is underpinned by a holistic pursuit of
service to the citizens. It is in this ideological vacuum that has festered all
shenanigans for the appropriation of the party by its members as a vehicle for
realising their selfish goals. In other words, what has marked out the party is
its members’ Darwinian struggle for supremacy. In this quest, the disparate
members owe no fidelity to the common ethos that binds them together in the
party; thus it can be used and dumped as they have done to other political
parties. It was this that led to the emergence of Bukola Saraki as Senate
President and Yakubu Dogara as House of Representatives Speaker in utter
disregard for the desire of some of the party’s leaders.

It is not only the
party that its members brutally disregard to pursue their selfish interests.
They have also disavowed their own promises to the citizens. But the citizens
are not beyond blame; they have had too high expectations from politicians of
the Nigerian hue. For despite all the pretensions, these politicians who decamped
from the PDP could not be expected to do anything good to improve the lot of
the people.

At his
inauguration, President Muhammadu Buhari in a moment that was seemingly
preceded by a great introspection declared that he belonged to everybody and belonged to nobody. If this were a clear
repudiation of all obligations that might have negated national interest, the
citizens would have appreciated it. But from the performance of Buhari in the
past 16 months, he has been far from proving that he understood the heavy
weight of the thoughts he expressed. For it is clear now that far from what he
would like the citizens to believe, he is beholden to some interests that
conflict with the collective good of the citizens.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Dear President Muhammadu Buhari: One reason the joys of electing
you as president abruptly stopped is because there’s now blood on the dance
floor. You alone have to decide if to call off the party or mop the dance
floor; but either way, you’ll need spatial awareness of why bleeding occurred
to spoil the party.

*Buhari

You stoked
price vectors to let the inflation genie out of the bottle and then burnt up
Nigerians’ cash assets with 68% Naira devaluation starting in the last week of
May, after increasing electricity tariff by 45% in March and after
increasing pump price of petrol by 67% few weeks earlier, to send all
things up in the air – with nothing settled as yet; not even Nigeria itself, which badly convulsed in feverish price hikes, country-wide, after reeling for
long from rocket-propelled grenades fired by hundreds of militias doubly armed
with improvised explosives now rampaging all across Nigeria.

As news of Nigeria’s mounting horrors spread, London’s Evening Standard reported it on September 7:
“Western firms can be forgiven for shying away from investing in Buhari’s
Nigeria,”
the Evening Standard said – with reasons ranging from untrammeled treasury
thefts to your having no clearly seen honest resolve to fight corruption. A
slew of foreign investors may as well be closing its files on Nigeria. They
are reportedly put off by the way things are going awry.

Schools crumble in Nigeria
without books as hospitals lay bare without imported medicines – all of which
can’t be bought at the current price exchange rate of N425 to a Dollar versus
the much lower April exchange rate of N260 to one Dollar. Workers are being
laid off in thousands and the casualties near 4.5 million Nigerians sacked
under your 15-month perplexing regime, according to anecdotal evidence.

Those
spared mass sackings are pitch-forked to half salary – in defiance of anything
contracts law say on the sanctity of existing agreements in an increasingly
anomic Nigeria – where, besides routine beheading on the streets from
neighbourhood spats, the Court of Appeal in Lagos division then declared a few
weeks ago that wearing the Muslim Hijab head-cover is superior, as Islamic Law,
and overrides any other law that a state government may enact as ‘school
uniform rule.’

A false
bottom for this rather zany declarative order was quickly constructed
judicially and called ‘fundamental human rights’…in a country contradictorily
self-described in its 1999 Constitution as ‘secular.’ In just under 16
months Nigeria
now looks eerily strange – like a horror film – to those looking in from
outside.

But to be
sure, Nigeria
was not as much a puzzle or hardscrabble place as this. Nigeria was,
contrarily, a fragile and less horrific and much less hopeless place. So,
what happened to CHANGE, President Buhari? That’s the crux. No two broom-wavers
on your APC side of the Nigeria’s
party politics divide ever understood what CHANGE means from get-go. In
retrospect, it would seem like a mere slogan just thrown in to replace absent
thought-process inside the party. It could even be worse. For after you won the
election on that abstract sloganeering you alone now have the writ to decide
what CHANGE means for a whole nation, since your party members were just
carried away by the sound of that word and mindlessly ran to town with it.

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

For most dispassionate observers of the
Nigerian political scene, the only thing which has destroyed the fabric of this
country even more than any conventional war, is corruption. This hydra-headed
monster has become Nigeria's
middle name. Aside from the untoward image this menace has wrought on the
country and the insult and embarrassment it has caused innocent Nigerians
abroad, it has inflicted irreparable damage to the basic foundations that held
the country together. Corruption has stunted our economic growth, our social
and physical infrastructure, our technological and industrial advancement and
has decapitated our institutions, which is why our over 40 research institutes
are no longer functional because they are headless.

(pix: AFP)

Even our academic and
military establishments and other security agencies cannot in all sincerity be
exonerated from the deadly effects of unbridled corruption. The determination
of President Muhammadu Buhari to combat corruption and to go after suspects
irrespective of their ethnic or political leanings should enlist the sympathy
of all well-meaning Nigerians. It is the more reason why even the opposition
Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, which controlled the central government and a
greater number of the 36 states and the FederalCapitalTerritory,
Abuja, until
May 29, 2015, recently endorsed the corruption war.

As Nigerians we certainly do not need any
soothsayer to tell us that ours is a corrupt country. We see corruption live
everyday. We see Mr. Corruption stalk the streets, the roads and the highways
across the country. We see Mr. Corruption bid us goodbye at the airports and
welcome us back into the country. We Nigerians greet Mr. Corruption at the
seaports and border posts as we clear our cargoes into the country. We shake
the juicy hands of Mr. Corruption as we savour the winning of a lucrative
contract. Truly, Nigeria,
which in 1996 was ranked by Transparency International as the second most
corrupt country in the world, achieved the utmost when in 1997, it was voted
the most corrupt country on the face of the earth. Ever since, the country has
had the misfortune of being grouped among the five most corrupt countries in
the world. There can never be any stigma as heinous as this in the comity of
nations across the world.

Since the current democratic political
experiment started in May 1999, all successive governments have had to place
anti-corruption war as part of their programmes of action, popularly known as
manifestos or agendas. Yet, all had paid lip service to the fight against
corruption except the current administration of President Muhammadu Buhari
which is showing signs of its determination to tackle the monster head on. As
can be deduced from the body language and actions of the President himself,
Nigerians are now confident that this battle will commence with the
resoluteness it deserves. Successive administrations, in spite of their much
vaunted hoopla over corruption war, were ironically refuting the claims of the
Berlin-based Transparency International (TI) that Nigeria was stinking with the evil
stench of corruption.

The recent launch of‘Change Begins With Me’campaign by the Muhammadu
Buhari’s administration goes against the moral etiquette of leadership by
example. In his speech at the ceremony, the president shifted the responsibility
of his Change agenda to Nigerians instead of the other way round. He seemed to
be blaming Nigerians for the mélange of problems facing the country under his
watch. He urged the citizens to change their orientation and attitude for the
country to get out of its current misfortune.

*President Buhari and Lai Mohammed

In other climes, it is the leadership that sets
the standards for the followership. The President’s remarks were hardly
surprising. Followers of events since this administration came to be would
agree that this government has not for once taken responsibility for anything.
All it has been doing is to blame others for its glaring shortcomings; always
passing the bulk. The government forgets that a leadership that does not take
responsibility is a failed leadership. People are voted into power to solve the
problems confronting society. They are expected to dig deep and come up with
solutions in order to uplift the lives of the citizenry.

They are not elected to lament and look for those
to blame for their lack of performance. Unfortunately, blame game and
propaganda have become essential ingredients of governance inNigeriain the last seventeen months. The
problem ofNigeriahas not been with the citizens, but
those who lead them. So there is need for value orientation and change. And
this should be directed at the leaders first of all. This is what Lai Mohammed
and the egg heads at the National Orientation Agency should have done instead
of turning the campaign on its head. With the wrong attitude with which the Change
campaign has started, one can state categorically that it is as good as dead.

Come to think of it, the timing of the‘Change Begins With Me’campaign is patently wrong. With
starvation and unprecedented hardship pervading the land, many Nigerians view
this as adding insult to injury. As they say, he who come to equity must come
with clean hands. The kind of campaign Nigerians want to see right now is such
that would put food on their tables; campaigns geared towards paying the
backlog of arrears of salary owed state and local government workers across the
country; campaigns that would alleviate the suffering of pensioners; campaigns
made up of think-tanks proffering solutions to the country’s economic quagmire;
campaigns aimed at alleviating the horror Nigerians are going through right
now; not one asking them to be disciplined or that blaming them for
government’s ineptitude. The situation has gone beyond political rhetoric and
blame game. How do you discipline a starving populace?

Friday, September 23, 2016

There
is no iota of doubt about it after all: we have ceaselessly experienced a
crisis of Buharism since our present president, Buhari, was exalted by us into
the presidency of our country.

Glaringly,
diurnally it is entering our exalted consciousness and imagination that our
pre-election idea or picture of him was one that exalted a man who had (and
still has) an exalted impression of himself. But we must make no mistake about
it. The man has elegance, but we have come to realize that this elegance that
enabled some persons to call him “Mr. Integrity” possesses some veneer that is
not well irriguous.

*Buhari

Perhaps
I, in my creative imagination, am deficient in my employment of language to
characterize the kind of president that we have witnessed since Buharism
entered our authoritative lexicon of political thought. In the present writing
I am not too certain of the language to employ to depict Buharism. In fact, I
am inclined to employ a language that cannot but be deader than Latin: the
language called Fula of the Fulani people.

How I
wish and itch in vain to speak and write Fula! Let me be uneconomical with
words. I itch to understand and express Buhari’s thoughts in Fula, but how
deader than Latin is Fula to me! Thus in vain and in vain will I try to
understand the great man Buhari and his Fula philosophy of political governance
in a democracy and republic such as ours, such as our country’s – ourNigeria’s
that always we must hail. Recently I had a lengthy conversation, which spoke
volumes, with an octogenarian who is based in the South West of our country.

The
octogenarian is fully at breast with our president’s mind-set and the
happenings in Aso Rock. Lengthy conversation He bared and opened ad
infinitum his mind on the Buhari presidency. He informed me, among other things, pertinently of how Hadza Bala Usman came on board as the current
managing director of our Nigerian Ports Authority.

Every
real nation state is an historical product. It is, in Marx's celebrated phrase,
"the official resume of the antagonism in civil society", but under
historically determinate circumstances. As such, it is the product of the
historically specific constellation of class relations and social conflicts in
which it is implicated. It may, therefore, indeed, it must, if it is not to
rest on its monopoly of the means of coercion alone, incorporate within its own
structure, the interests not only of the dominant but of the subordinate
classes. In this quite specific sense, then, every real nation state has an
inherently relative independence, including, as well, the independence to
understand the dynamics of its made-made domestic crises. In consequence,
therefore, the general characteristics of the Nigerian nation state today may
be seen in terms of the enormity of its domestic crises and social
contradictions.

Therefore, those who murdered Nigeria, and are
still killing its residues include, but not limited to: a big and comprador
bourgeoisie that has abdicated its political aspirations and allied itself to
semi-feudal interests; a discontented small and medium bourgeoisie made up of a
certain class of professionals and intellectuals, potentially revolutionary,
but which hesitates to renew the struggle for its national liberation. There is
a sleeping working class which is supposed to be the prime revolutionary force
but which cannot define clearly its trade union tasks and political aims. There
is a large crowd of youths, the student body that constitute about 60 per cent
of the national population, which has abdicated its responsibility of serving
as light to the national ideal due largely to intellectual dishonesty,
ignorance or docility arising from poverty of ideas. There is also, a peasant
mass of small landless factory hands, artisans and motorcycle operators
otherwise known as "Okada riders", who need a clear vision of their
tasks and a framework within which to organize their own action in unity with
the working class. Above all, a group of shameless, opportunistic and sadistic
Generals (retired and serving), domestic tyrants and usurpers who, because of
their prolonged crime against the people of this country, do not want political
power to shift to its rightful owners for fear of being probed. And, of course,
a handful of totalitarian Devils called traditional rulers who, having been
aware of their gross irrelevance in a democratic society, strive to ally
themselves with dictators, expired warlords and anti-democratic elements in
power in order to entrench feudal power in the local government councils.

It is in this context that we must examine
critically the way forward to the present logjam in the country. It would be
recalled that the deepening crises that resulted in the Nigerian Civil War were
the aftermath of the cumulative anger of the forces of real change against the
reactionary superstructure that was the FirstRepublic.
After the bloody civil war, and thanks to the oil boom which provided them with
the rare opportunity to line their pockets, the military rulers in
collaboration with the agrarian mercantile big bourgeoisie, together with a
small sector connected with industry, tied their future more and more to the
semi-feudal structure inherited from the colonial system. Because of their
quantitative and qualitative weaknesses and the fear of the workers' movement
and the surge of the masses, they were, at the beginning, disposed to ally
themselves with whatever was acceptable of foreign monopolist capital, then in
the process of conversion to a neo-colonialist framework.

Thursday, September 22, 2016

By Emmanuel Ugwu

If a
perceptive artist was commissioned to draw a portrait of President Muhammadu
Buhari, he would have to think of how to present an image of a conflicted,
two-faced commander in chief. Buhari is a hawk and a dove. A lion and a lamb. A
war monger and a pacifist.

He is waging wars against cattle rustlers and
Niger Delta militants while winking at the prolific mass murderers that
parade as ‘herdsmen’. He is fighting to secure Nigerian cattle and oil
facilities even as he literally feigns ignorance of a genocidal phenomenon
claiming countless Nigerian lives.

The
double standard is not as a result of an oversight. Buhari receives daily
security briefings. He is constantly updated on the condition of safety of
lives and property in Nigeria.
He is furnished with processed data on past and present security threats and
predictive intelligence on future scenarios. His rich knowledge of the
security situation of Nigeria
is critical to his ability to fulfill the fundamentals of his job description
as the president of the republic.

So,
why is Buhari treating the wastage of Nigerians by the ‘herdsmen’ with
asymmetric indifference? Why does he condone the killing of Nigerians when he
is raging against cattle rustling and pipeline vandalism? Aren’t human lives
incomparable, in value, with cattle or crude oil? Shouldn't the protection of
endangered human beings come before that of animals and oil?

This
question is important because Buhari and his generals categorize every serious
security challenge as a battle and create a special military operation to
defeat it. They dedicate a new operation to any pattern of criminal behavior
that they consider too dangerous to be allowed to wane on its own timetable.

This
inclination to resort to military operation is the reflex of a Buhari
presidency that feels it is under obligation to use any effective means to
de-escalate any spiral of criminality before its perpetrators develop a false
sense of invincibility.

Constitutional
purists take exception to this new normal of deploying the military to
undertake law enforcement assignments that fall under the purview of the
Nigerian police. The idealists say that repurposing the military as a quick fix
talisman for suppressing domestic crimes is essentially unlawful and
potentially risky. They argue that fitting the military into the vacuum of
weakness of the Nigerian police, in the long run, could have the effect of
orienting the focus of the Nigerian military away from their core mission. They
surmise that the perennial distraction of the Nigerian military with police
duties may be eroding the professionalism of our armed forces, and therefore,
vitiating the readiness of the Nigerian military to defend the country against
external aggression.

The
Nigerian Army is presently prosecuting two military operations to combat
violent crimes that the Buhari administration deems to be beyond the capacity
of the Nigerian police to confront. Operation ‘Harbin Kunama’ is addressing the
menace of cattle rustling in some parts of the North. Operation ‘Crocodile
Smile’ is battling the sabotage of oil installations by militants in the Niger
Delta region. But there is no hurricane-name-sounding, operation-scale
military response to the runaway terrorism of the ‘herdsmen’.

In
July, Buhari flew to Zamfara Stateto launch Operation Harbin Kunama.
Prior to that time, a part of Zamfara state, particularly Dansadau forest, had
become the playground of cattle rustlers. Armed gangs resident in that bush
were invading villages from and impoverishing people whose wealth is mainly
denominated in cattle.

Buhari
went to the forest dressed in military uniform. His physical presence and his
appearance in combat gear were a message. He wanted to signal that he took the
suffering of the victims of cattle rustling seriously, and that he was
committed to doing everything within his powers to end the scourge.

At
the occasion, Buhari spoke to theheart of the matter. He
said that his government viewed cattle rustling as a crime. He warned, in the
clearest terms, that the mandate of the operation he came to kickstart was to
achieve a complete wipeout of cattle rustlers troubling the people of Zamfara,
Katsina, Kebbi and Niger
states.

In their tepid search
for solutions to the current economic crisis, our political leaders are fixated
on two culprits that gnaw at the nation’s wellbeing.

It is either the past
that is chastised for not catering for its future or the militancy in the Niger
Delta that has driven oil revenue to its nadir.

*Buhari

Our current leaders can keep avoiding
culpability for the nation’s economic recession. The danger is that any
optimism about overcoming the crisis in a short time may soon evaporate as long
as our political leaders fail to recognise that it is not only the past that is
sullied by the administration of Goodluck Jonathan and his predecessors that
should be blamed, but the present that is anchored on the current
administration is equally complicit.

We are on the right path to economic
redemption only when we appreciate the fact that the affliction that is the
source of the recession is simply that our politics reeks of a crude conflation
of national and personal interests by political leaders. Actuated by the credo
of politics that negates national interest, politicians pursue purely selfish
goals and present them to the citizens as targeted at engendering national
transformation.

Thus no matter how
potentially workable the recommendations from the citizens for the development
of their nation, most political leaders do not have that capacity to
accommodate them. And this is why all ideas about development, no matter how
ill-bred , must come from their cronies because they would not pose any threat
to their interests. Or why have all the great proposals for the development of
the nation for over five decades not launched it into the league of the
developed?

Now that there is a
flurry of suggestions from the citizens as regards how to overcome the
recession, our leaders may only take the ones that would not threaten their
personal interests. President Muhammadu Buhari has been asked to invite experts
to help him salvage the economy. Some citizens want him to invite the nation’s
best economists to proffer solutions to the economic problems. Some have even
canvassed the return of former Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.
The former minister has already said she would not be ready to serve under the
Buhari government when she is invited as she wants other people to contribute
their own quota to development. Okonjo-Iweala may not even be an acceptable
choice having been tainted by her association with the Peoples Democratic Party
(PDP) when she served its government. She is still subjected to excoriation for
triggering the crisis in the first place by her feckless economic management.

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

There is this apocryphal tale that the president of the United States of America,
said to be our planet’s most powerful country, travels carrying a bag that
holds the key to war and peace in the world. It is claimed that the briefcase
contains the code the US
leader may unravel to release the huge atomic arsenal of God’s Own Country in
the event of an attack.

*President Buhari

If he’s away from the US and he’s briefed on his hotline,
all he does to enable a lethal hit-back is to go for the bag and probably a key
in his pocket. But if he wants peace, he simply allows his pocket be at peace.

Early in 2016 however, sitting President Barack Obama
spiked this story of one man playing
God, one man who upon a cryptic call thousands of kilometres from Washington, can decide
the fate of billions of souls worldwide, can trigger a contest to destroy
mankind. He told a YouTube interviewer that all he holds in the trousers pocket
are harmless mementoes, none approximating a nuclear lock.

The gay broadcaster Ingrid Nilsen fired the question that
laid all bare: what does President Obama carry in his pocket? The US leader dug
into his right trouser pocket and out came an assortment of keepsakes: a rosary
given to him by Pope Francis, a tiny Buddha, a metal poker chip he said he got
from ‘a bald biker with weird mustache’ in 2007,a Coptic Cross from Ethiopia
and a Hindu statuette of monkey god.

A strange collection for a head of state to carry! But he
says when he feels tired or discouraged as he battles American and global
headaches he reaches into the pocket for relief and mental refreshment.
According to Obama, they inspire him and help him “get back to work”.

Now after thrilling myself with Obama’s revelation and
observing the travels of our own President Muhammadu Buhari, I have begun to
wonder what the Nigerian leader also takes along in the trousers under his
flowing agbada. Surely Buhari, the
leader of the world’s most populous black nation, would have run into numerous
people and well-wishers who would deposit some gifts with him after each
encounter.

There is this anecdote in Igboland about the grasshopper and the
bird called “Okpoko”, a mysterious
bird reputed for its queer ways. Okpoko
is a noisy predatory bird. She rarely catches her preys because her noisy
approach always warns her victims in advance and they scamper for safety at her
approach. But the grasshopper would not listen and scorned those who warned
her.

*Arthur Nwankwo

Regaling in her illusion that Okpoko
would not come, the grasshopper was caught unawares despite the noisy approach
of the Okpoko. In the end the
grasshopper’s stubbornness and indisposition to hearken to wise counsel would
cost her, her life. So today, one would always hear the Igbo say: “Ukpana Okpoko buuru; nti chiri ya”
literally meaning “any grasshopper that
falls prey to the Okpoko is irredeemably deaf and stubborn”.

Nigeria is like the stubborn grasshopper. Even with the noisy approach of
the Okpoko she does not sense any
danger. Her leaders would never listen to informed warnings. I recall that in
June this year, I warned that Nigerian’s economy was taking a dangerous turn
for the worse. On that occasion, I had alerted Nigerians of the collapsing
economy pointing out that sooner than we expected, the economy would go into
recession. I recall also that on that occasion, many apologists of this
lame-duck Buhari government went to town to label me a prophet of doom; most
calling for my head, some even went as far as suggesting that I have misdiagnosed
Nigerian’s ailment and therefore offered the wrong therapies.

Interestingly, the Federal Government, after several ostrich
evasion in admitting the obvious came out in August to admit that Nigeria’s
economy has collapsed. Today the economy is officially in recession. Some days
back (August 30th 2016), the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) confirmed that
the Nigerian economy has gone into recession. According to the NBS, the economy
contracted by 2% in the second quarter and unemployment is also on the rise.
Many have lost their jobs in the formal sector as firms have cut staff or
folded up altogether.

This is no longer news. What is rather worrisome is the lethargy
and ineptitude of this government in rising up to the challenge.
Embarrassingly, Muhammadu Buhari and his co-travelers have repeatedly tried to
justify their lack of vision and mission on the past PDP-led Federal
Government. This escapist excuse has never, and will never be acceptable
essentially because it is the kind of excuse a lousy and slothful man gives for
failing to provide food for his family. The Bible clearly states that a man who
cannot provide for his family is worse than an infidel (1Timothy 5:8). The
federal government is the father of all Nigerians. If as the father, it fails to
live up to its expectation but take refuge in an attitude of cold complicity
and naïve excuses, it is worse than worse can be.

Much as I would not absolve the past government of any wrong
doing, it will be preposterous to blame it wholesale for the collapse of the
Nigerian economy. The truth is that our economy has always been sick. We never
cared and today a minor health disorder that could have been contained and
nipped in the bud has been allowed to metastasize into a cancerous terminal
illness.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Anambra State marked its silver
jubilee on August 27, 2016, emitting rays of brilliant colours that emphasize
the uniqueness of its people as wonderfully crafted by God, continuously
demonstrating to the entire world that they are endowed with the dominant
infrastructures of greatness, unsurpassed pacesetters in all noble walks of
life – the arts, entrepreneurship, leadership, scholarship, the sciences,
sports, statesmanship, etc. How apposite that this land of a blessed people has
as its slogan the revealing title of Light of the Nation! There isn’t any
aspect of national life in which Ndi Anambra do not excel.

*Gov Willie Obiano of Anambra State

Little wonder that Jubilee
Governor Willie Obiano waxed prophetically lyrical in,Please, Let’s Do It Together, his speech to mark the anniversary:“Anambra
state will be the food basket of Africa in the
next 25 years. In the next 25 years, Anambra will not depend on federal
allocation. It will be known as a state that transited to become the Taiwan of
Africa. We are number one among states that were created 25 years ago. We pay
salaries as and when due. We are the safest state, and we have attracted
billions of dollars in investment to the state.”

Yet, AnambraState’s
great future, and the fact that its affairs are currently under the controls
of a pair of capable hands, belies the palpable dangers that lie ahead. The
situation evokes the sort of apprehension that informed the late great poet,
Christopher Okigbo’s writing of his 1966 poem entitled “Come Thunder”, the
first four lines of which go thus:

Now that the triumphant march has
entered the last street
corners,

Remember, O dancers, the thunder
among the clouds…

Now that laughter, broken in two,
hangs tremulous between the teeth,

Remember, O dancers, the lightning
beyond the earth…

The smell of blood already floats
in the lavender-mist of the afternoon.

What seeks Anambra’s negation?
What strives to dim its brilliance and turn the people’s joys into one long,
dark night of bewitched recrimination and retrogression? The answer is
FALSEHOOD. Deliberately manufactured falsehood! Let’s illustrate.

I recently took a telephone call
from an educated friend domiciled in the United States since the 1970s. To
my astonishment, he exhibited a rage uncharacteristic of his calm and urbane
nature. “Obiano will never have a second term of office,” he bawled, swearing
that I had made a fatal mistake by recently accepting appointment as the
Anambra State Governor’s Media Director. On and on he railed, his voice rising
to a crescendo. When I managed to put in a word edgewise, I reminded him that
our friendship mustn’t be confused with the relationship between a
cane-wielding village headmaster and a recalcitrant truant. We were basically
friends. Could he possibly hold his peace and take a listen? He agreed, having
screamed three principal complaints: (1) He had heard that Governor Obiano
ordered soldiers to gun down peaceful IPOB demonstrators. (2) He had read from
a Nigerian-owned, UK-based online newspaper a July 25, 2016 story entitled How Governor Obiano Embezzled N75b In Two Years. (3) He was despondent at another newspaper report that widows had
been “forced from their stalls” and consequently rioted in Onitsha.

I proceeded to provide him with
the correct version of things. Although a national daily had so claimed, there
never was a women’s riot anywhere in AnambraState including Onitsha. Here are the facts: there is a
street market on the main road that issues into Onitsha
through the NigerBridge. It stands on a
land owned by Nath Okechukwu, the boss of Interbau, the road construction
giant. Chief Okechukwu had ceded the land to a younger sister for temporary
business purposes, pending its conversion into his firm’s headquarters. But the
sister had leased it to agents who made an instant vegetable market out of the
land, collecting “landing” fees and rents without remitting any taxes to
government. Every so often vehicles plowed into the market, causing casualties.
The place has no toilets, a veritable eyesore.

Once
upon a time, there was a young country struggling in the comity of nations to
find her place in the sun. For in this young country of brave people, it was
discovered that freedom is a God-given right. So impressed were the citizens
with this belief that they lit a candle to symbolize their freedom. But, in
their wisdom, they knew that the flame could not burn alone. So, they lit a
second candle to symbolize man's right to govern himself. The third candle was
lighted to signify that the rights of the individual were more important than
the rights of the State. And finally, they lit a fourth candle to show that
government should not do for the people those things which the people should do
for themselves.

*Buhari

As the four candles of freedom burned
brightly, the young nation prospered. And as they prospered, they grew fat. And
as they grew fat, they got lazy. When they got lazy, they asked the government
to do things for them which they had been doing for themselves, and one of the
candles went out. As government became bigger, the people became smaller, and
the government became all important. And the rights of the individual were
sacrificed to the all important rights of the State. Then the second candle
went out. In their apathy and indifference, they asked those who bear armour to
govern them, and the marshals of the commandist clan did, and the third candle
went off. In the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security, a
comfortable life, and they lost all - comfort and security and freedom.

For, you see! When the freedom they wanted
most was freedom from responsibility, then Nigerians ceased to be free. The
last candle has been extinguished. One could assume, then, that we have it
made. Never have any people at any time, anywhere, had it so good. But in our
present abundance and luxury in the galaxy of power, something is wrong. People
aren't happy. They no longer walk down the streets of our cities smiling or
whistling a happy tune. There is discontent, and one can sense the fear of the
unknown. Everywhere, the people are grumbling, cursing, jeering and hooting.

Nigerians are jittery. There seems to be a
tarnish on our golden Mecca.
We've created a new breed of men and women who can't work but loot, just like
we've created a new breed of men and women who crave for power for the sake of
it. You had an opportunity to turn the nation to an Eldorado, but you
supervised the mindless looting of our national patrimony into private pockets.
You wailed and roared and were given the power, but you're seeing it as an
opportunity to favour your tribesmen at the expense of others and you're still
enmeshed in blame game while the country is bleeding. And, instead of the
slogan, "God bless Nigeria",
all we now hear is, "Let us go our separate ways". The signs aren't
too hard to read. They are the signs of internal decay - the dry rot of apathy
and indifference.

Saturday, September 17, 2016

By Onyiorah Paschal
Chiduluemije
The foregoing remark credited to and drawn from the speech delivered by
President Muhammadu Buhari during the launch of the National Re-orientation
Campaign tagged Change Begins With Me, on Thursday, September 8, 2016, is, to
say the least, quite unbecoming of the President. Indeed, the man who is now a
proverbial tortoise that once upon a time assured all animals at the beginning
of their journey, of an existing promised land, like an Eldorado, and only for
it (the same tortoise) to announce in the course of the journey, and to the
chagrin of all animals, that the so-called promised land which they had all set
out to behold and possess was the same as the land they had just left in search
of milk and honey (thus obviating the need for their journey).

*President Buhari and Lai Mohammed

But
unlike what obtained in the old (and abandoned) land, all animals were now
individually saddled with the responsibilities of tracing and accessing the new
Kingdom through the different paths apparently leading to it, basically because
the main entrance to the promised land was practically unknown. This tale in a
nutshell, aptly illustrates the analogous (abrupt) paradigm shift in the APC’s
and/or President Muhammadu Buhari’s ‘change
slogan’ afterthought called Change Begins With Me.

Of course, it is almost
unbelievable that the same man who – with hindsight – apparently tricked the
electorate into voting him into power with an unmistakable promise of a
positive change in the living standard of all, is today squarely pontificating
about a clearly diversionary tactic called Change Begins With Me, and, as it
were, almost patronising both the hungry and the angry for “failing” to first
of all ask themselves what they have done to change their ways before expecting
the government to change their lives.

As it were, many an APC supporter would have by now definitely found it
extremely difficult to fathom the essence of this seemingly derogatory remark
against the people made by no less a person than President Muhammadu Buhari,
which, critically viewed, ought not to have arisen in the very first place. And
the reason for this thinking is not far-fetched. For one, a campaign promise of
change made to the people remains a campaign promise, and so it does not
necessarily follow in a thriving democracy that the people must be willing to
dance to the tune and/or comply with the dictates, wishful thinking, whims and
caprices of their elected representatives, before the latter could be
reasonable enough to bring to fruition all that had been promised during the
electioneering. Therefore, it makes no sense at all for anybody, be that Mr.
President or whoever, to begin to impress it on the masses to alter their ways
as a condition precedent for being “entitled” to demand, inter alia, that the
APC-led government accomplish its campaign promises.

Ironically, though, the
same President who now appears to be patronising Nigerians and scoffing at
their increasing demand for a positive change to take effect as promised by the
All Progressives Congress, is yet to repent of his own old ways or, better
still, renounce his ethnic and religious preferences and inclination towards
people and issues of national importance. Evidently, there is no gainsaying
that his glaringly lopsided appointments so far still reek of and speak volumes
about facts associated with his unpalatable past.

Friday, September 16, 2016

Plagiarism is not a trivial matter. President
Muhammadu Buhari made a terrible mistake last Thursday. He plagiarized
President Barack Obama’s speech to launch “Change Begins With Me.”

So
you didn’t notice that our president lifted from Obama’s 2008 victory speech
and passed it off as if the words were his own? The argument will rage, but the moral problem of plagiarism on a day Mr.
President launched a campaign to demand honesty and integrity from the people
is what we should concern ourselves with.

*President Buhari with US President Obama at the Whitehouse

I’m
not a wailing wailer and I don’t like the downfall of any man but I also don’t
like to be deceived. The
very last thing you should do when you’re launching a campaign like this is to
be dishonest with the people.

As
Buhari talked down on Nigerians during the launch of the campaign spearheaded by
no other person, other than the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Muhammed,
known for his trash-talk, particularly for the opposition, I started following
the speech line-by-line. I
was alarmed to make the discovery. It was a scandal that escaped the attention
of our newspapers. It is one of two things: either people don’t pay particular
attention to Buhari’s words or we are a nation of anything goes.

Only
in July, Melania Trump, the wife of the Republican White House hopeful, Donald
Trump, was caught in the web of plagiarism after she spoke at the Republican
National Convention. She plagiarized Michelle Obama’s speech. It was a big
headline on television screen and national newspapers. Indeed it was a “global”
headline. Yes,
a prime part of Buhari’s speech to the nation last Thursday to launch a
campaign encouraging new culture of transparency, attitudinal change and hard
work among Nigerians was plagiarized from America’s President Barack Obama’s
2008 victory speech.

Buhari’s
speech during the launch of the “Change Begins With Me”, a new national
orientation campaign, contained largely the same sentiment and arrangement of
words that President Obama used in his 2008 victory speech after he was elected
the first American black president.

The
president lifted a whole paragraph from Obama’s speech and passed it off as his
own when he said: “We must resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship,
pettiness and immaturity that have poisoned our country for so long. Let us
summon a new spirit of responsibility, spirit of service, of patriotism and
sacrifice, Let us all resolve to pitch in and work hard and look after, not
only ourselves but one another, What the current problem has taught us is that
we cannot have a thriving army of rent seekers and vested interests, while the
majority suffers.”

Until last week, it
might have been dismissed as delusional to think that President Muhammadu
Buhari considers the citizens as people he has conquered. But if the
body language of the president has failed to magically make available the
dividends of democracy to the citizens, it has at least in recent times
reinforced the notion of his seeing himself as a conqueror, and thus a blight
on our democratic experience.

*President Buhari

Here are a people who have been brutalised by decades of misrule and who invested so much hope
in the Buhari’s change mantra. Over a year after waiting for the
realisation of the promised change, Buhari has unabashedly disavowed it.
Passing the buck, Buhari has rather asked the citizens to make the change a
reality.

Yet, Buhari and his
party members are the only people who know the breadth and length of
the change he envisaged. The citizens did not sit down at a table to
arrive at a template of his promised change. At best, the president only
revealed snippets of the change: a robust economy that would guarantee full
employment and a parity of the naira and the dollar, and as a palliative
measure for those who are still jobless, the payment of a stipend of
N5,000.

Buhari’s new mantra of
change beginning with the citizens is an expression of his sense of
triumphalism. The new mantra brims with the hauteur of a president who has not only
impenitently abdicated his responsibility, but who is yet to come to terms with
his own failure to grapple with the problems he was elected to solve. The
citizens could tolerate the president’s incompetence while hoping that with his
seeking the advice of those who should know better, he could still fulfill the
people’s expectations. But with a mindset that the citizens have been
conquered, the president does not need to attach any importance to such advice.
Or why would the president tell the people that change begins with them when he
is expected to make good his promise? As far as the president is concerned, he
has used the change mantra to gain power and those who are interested in its
actualisation are free to torment themselves with that triviality.

But the president may
not be wrong after all. From his Olympian height, he can only see the
citizens he has conquered. The conquest began with his ministers and other
aides who are supposed to advise him on the right decisions to take. We must be
reminded that the president did not hide his disdain for his would-be
ministers. They were only imposed on him by the constitution. And this was
why he considered them as noise makers whose contribution to national
development could only be consigned to a marginal space compared to that
of civil servants in whom he reposes more confidence.